Janet Mendelshohn, Birmingham

A young woman, clearly soliciting, is silhouetted against a rain-drenched backdrop in high-contrast monochrome. The mid-20th century photograph could easily constitute a cliche from the then-voguish tradition of social realist documentary, but it’s somehow much more and much better. Encouraged by the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, in the late 60s US academic and film-maker Janet Mendelsohn arrested life on Birmingham’s Varna Road, then a notorious red-light area, for all time. By concentrating mostly on one girl, referred to only as Kathleen, who worked as a prostitute, Mendelsohn’s series brings home more than the usual plaintive stereotypes. Signs of a long-gone world are there – factory chimneys; a mucky child playing naked in the back street – but so are empathetic insights into timeless struggles of yearning, hurt and making ends meet.

Tonico Lemos Auad, Bexhill-on-Sea

This London-based, Brazil-born artist’s sculptures are intent on telling tales. Yet these are not stories of the literary kind, rather ones in which the viewer is invited to share the narrative of the object’s materialisation. Craft and meticulous labour is both the methodology and subject of Lemos Auad’s work. In his 2015 installation Small Fires, the artist presented 150 fizzy pop cans, their paint almost entirely scratched off, the time-consuming task complete bar the artist’s retention of a few specific motifs. His other recent works include crocheted sculptures that hang like stalactites or rise up as misshapen columns, each monuments to the labour inherent in their creation. Here there’ll also be new work based on the slow pastime of gardening.

Stan Douglas, London

What happens to society, its morality and the narratives that inform that sense of right and wrong in a time of conflict is an enduring subject for Stan Douglas. In a new epic film work, Douglas adapts Joseph Conrad’s underrated 1907 novel The Secret Agent into a six-screen installation, shifting the action from Victorian London to 1970s Portugal and the aftermath of the “carnation revolution” that removed the authoritarian Estado Novo regime. While the work has all the production values of Hollywood, it features cast of local Lisbon actors and none of Tinseltown’s simplistic narratives. Instead, the anarchism and ambiguity of Conrad’s original book (in which the reader finds themselves rooting for a terrorist) spills into the movie in a formal sense. Thoughts are left free to roam and conclusions left hanging.

James Irwin & Lilah Fowler, London

The windmill was a recurring motif in 18th and 19th-century landscape painting. Far from being the bucolic symbol it is often read as now, it was in fact emblematic to artists of how we harnessed nature to our own ends. To some extent, this new collaborative installation by Fowler and Irwin is working in that tradition. How The Mind Comes To Be Furnished, a sound work, directs our attention to the “landscape” of Wi-Fi data streams and the havoc they apparently play with wind turbines. Perhaps the pair are suggesting that data centres are the satanic mills of our time.

Olga Jevrić, Leeds

This is the first solo exhibition for a Serbian artist who died two years ago. Jevrić’s series of Proposals For Monuments were initially created in response to national competitions for commemorative memorials remembering the suffering of Yugoslavians during the second world war. Her maquettes developed from the 1950s onwards into a highly distinctive body of abstract sculptures, a tradition for which there was little precedent in her home country. Mostly created from a novel mixture of cement and iron dust, and inspired by weatherworn medieval Balkan tombstones, her creations are far starker than the work of British contemporaries such as Moore and Hepworth. Cage-like armatures encompass pitted masses that look as if they have been eroded by the wind or sea into scarecrow-like forms. It’s not easy to create art that looks worn down by nature and time, but Jevrić just about managed it.

Eric Bainbridge, Sunderland

Eric Bainbridge is known for sculptures in which the pure modernist tradition of geometric abstraction and the brute tactile reality of soldered steel are both thoroughly undermined: his work comprises top-heavy constructions, rude-looking sausage blobs and 3D cartoon speech bubbles. This exhibition of his drawings continues the artist’s characteristic theme of anti-macho daftness. Sparse outlines of studied spontaneity are doodled across scraps of graph paper and his images accumulate an absurdist cast of characters, most notably the pointy-nosed Jimmy The Nail. Bainbridge acts like a grown-up kid, concocting playground totems, but, of course, it’s all artful contrivance. Maybe a more fitting allusion would be to an architect sketching out ideas on a serviette over a third glass of wine at dinner. When it comes down to it, Bainbridge risks amateurishness precisely because he’s a fully paid-up professional.

Beyond Beauty: Transforming The Body In Ancient Egypt, London

That the neo-gothic mansion of Two Temple Place is temporarily opening to the public would be a fine thing alone. Yet the fact it will host an array of Britain’s Egyptian treasures – a dazzling selection of painted coffins, masks, figurines, crafted reliefs and carved canoptic jars (containers holding the organs of the deceased), gathered from regional institutions – is a uniquely enticing prospect. Throughout, the objects’ individual personalities emerge – the infant buried with her poppy-shaped bead necklace; the faces of grandees depicted on their sarcophagi – and coalesce into the story of a great civilisation.